This week we were hit with two equally distressing reports on the current state of young people, now, and looking towards the next decade.
The first was a YouGov poll, which showed over half of 14–17-year-olds (55%) believe their lives would be “worse than their parents” and 9% saying they felt “hopeless” about the future. This is a bleak picture of the UK’s youth at a time when the world should seem exciting and full of possibilities. But for younger Gen Z’s and the new kids on the block, Gen A, it’s largely not anymore. As a generation they are sadder, sicker and more isolated than any previous generation of young people, possessing an overwhelmingly bleak view of their future prospects, crippling worries about money and climate (among many other worries), appalling mental health, and with technology often taking the place of their close friendships and social encounters.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/04/uk-teenagers-parents-standard-of-living-research
Sometimes data can fail to adequately paint a poignant enough picture and despite the awfulness of these findings, there were no real shockwaves that came as a result. Rishi Sunak didn’t express faux-shock and make any pledges to improve the prospects of our nation’s young. The reaction in the media was tepid at best – just another sad statistic about how bad things have gotten for the generation that is supposed to represent our nation’s future and best hope. Ho hum.
The second piece that should have rocked us further was further interviews with the devastated father of Mia Janin, a 14-year-old girl, who took her own life after being intensely bullied at a London school – bullying that originated and was exponentially exacerbated by all the kids involved being on Snapchat and TikTok.
If you can stomach it (and you should listen, because it brings home the reality of how bad things are getting for lots of young people), listen to Mia Janin’s last voicemail to a friend basically pleading for help and support. Amongst everything that is heart-breaking about this last voicemail is how scared she is. She is utterly terrified about going to school the following day – something she tragically never did – and facing her tormentors. It is a gut-punch to come to terms with the fact this young girl was so terrorised by her same age classmates that death seemed more appealing than going to school and what’s worse is, Mia Janin is not an isolated case.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0nd1gnj4lo
There are hundreds of thousands of young people terrified by the prospect of school, bullying, judgement and the kind of sadistic treatment that has become so casual and commonplace, we barely even notice it anymore – often until it’s too late.
Talk to a room of teenagers – really talk to them – and just about every one of them regardless of race, sex, or socioeconomic background will admit to doing and saying things on social media that they never would in real life. Whether telling someone to go and kill themselves, or calling someone something so deeply cruel and offensive, that quite often when you show the words to the teenager, they themselves wrote, they are quite shocked. There is an undoubted dissonance between our online self and ‘real’ self with the screen giving us licence to do and say things that wouldn’t remotely occur to us in our real, everyday lives. And this is a hundred-fold for teenagers who still have a pretty spongy prefrontal cortex, so have a diminished capacity to fully reckon with the consequences of their actions.
Furthermore, bullying is often a particularly unpleasant team sport, and so when one person is really in the firing line, it becomes a nasty pile-on, giving those piling on a kind of sadistic sense of camaraderie but also making it quite difficult for detractors to stand up and say this is wrong lest they end up in the firing line. As we can see in the case of Mia Janin, she became the victim of a particularly pernicious online and in-person pile on, and reading between the lines, even her classmates and friends who thought her treatment wrong might have been scared to step in and say something, compounding her isolation and terror.
So, this leaves us with the question of how we got to a situation where young people are so desensitised that driving classmates to the brink seems like NBD – or worse, kind of fun?
I think there are two key elements that we can actually address if we want to avoid future tragedies and start to make things better for all young people.
The first lies in the YouGov poll, because without giving kids who bully and their bullying behaviour a total pass, unhappy and hurt people – particularly young people – tend to lash out, project and hurt other people. Happy and healthy kids from emotionally and financially stable backgrounds tend to focus on positive things and building their own lives and far less on the lives and dramas of other kids. Like watching miserable soaps or endless bleak true crime, we tend to enjoy being distracted by the pain of others when we are in pain ourselves, but life isn’t a Netflix menu. So, it’s time we made giving young people – all young people – some positive options to choose from an absolute priority.
And this means, proper meaningful investment in education, higher education, services for young people, mental health facilities and choosing a government that prioritises those things over making their shareholders and investors richer – everyone else, especially the young be dammed.
But on a more immediate, practical note, I’ve started a technique with the thousands of young people I work with called PBF – which stands for PAUSE, BREATHE, FACE.
Any time, they are posting whether it’s on Snapchat, TikTok, Insta or any of the others and whether it’s a comment or an original post, I’m asking them to repeat the mantra PBF – or PAUSE, BREATHE, FACE, whereby they pause for a second, take a breath and picture the face of the person they are commenting to, or for example, their Mum or Dad’s face if they were to see the post or comment.
This doesn’t prohibit or control a young person’s online behaviour or actions, but what it does do is enforce a beat, where they can see through the red mist of excitement or groupthink and take control of their own thoughts and action long enough to think about consequences and the feelings of the person they are talking to or targeting.
This won’t fix the many ills of social media or the intense unhappiness of millions of young people, but it’s a tiny action that works because it slows down the teenager, pierces that bubble of teenage recklessness and requires them to think, which kicks in that humanity that is more prevalent in our IRL actions and interactions and often absent in an online feeding frenzy.
So, if you have a teen/pre-teen that uses Snap, TikTok or any of the others, ask them to do this one.
Pause
Breathe
Face
It won’t fix all the ills of social media and isn’t a magic wand to wave away teenage cruelty, but we have to do something to prevent the next tragedy and maybe, just maybe the pause, taking a breath, and picturing a face will start to stem some of the sadness and cruelty that has become an epidemic and is hurting and killing millions.
Pause
Breathe
Face.
Try it.